At a time when work, family obligations and, you know, the dismantling of patriarchal social structures are stretching us all thinner than Anne Hathaway in Les Miserables, why are we focusing our energies on yet another afternoon of baby bagatelle? …

But my discomfort with the gender-reveal party goes beyond my standard objection to fanfare surrounding gestational markers—which is primarily that, because we don’t celebrate non-pregnancy-related milestones with the same enthusiasm, we’re reinforcing the archaic notion that a woman’s value rests squarely in her ability to grow tiny humans. The issue with gender-reveal parties in particular is: Aren’t they potentially damaging to said tiny humans?

For starters, gender-reveal parties don’t actually reveal gender—they reveal anatomy. Gender is a wholly different thing, inextricably tied to the social constructs around it…

Projecting gender perceptions onto a fetus becomes especially thorny when you take into consideration that, globally, one in every 1000 to 1500 children is born with a visible form of Difference of Sex Development (DSD), which means being neither entirely male nor female, since the chromosomal/genital makeup falls somewhere in between—an enlarged clitoris capable of erections, for instance. (Broader definitions of DSD put this number closer to 1 in 100 children.) Then there are the millions of kids assigned a sex at birth with which they don’t align: 150,000 American teenagers identify as transgender. In a ritual that celebrates only a binary way of thinking about identity, we’re leaving a cross-section of the population out, adding to a culture of trans and intersex shame. And for what? Confetti poppers?

This is what happens when you ignore the commanding heights of culture.